Chicago food situation

Introduction

Chicago is the city that was once called Hog Butcher for its huge meat-processing industry. The city by the lake is most famous for its Chicago-style hot dogs, its deep dish pizza and 1920s gangsters like Al Capone. The food industry here is closely intertwined with the culture and makes the city truly unique.

Unfortunately, as varied and as tasty as the dishes can be they are still the subject of health concerns due to the sometimes unsanitary establishments serving them. We will try during this article to shed light on the ugly side hiding such delicious meals. We kindly invite our readers to join us in our culinary tour of the Windy City and unfortunately our first stop may be a bit nausea inducing so hold tight !

To start our data-driven journey we needed to rely on strong and reliable data sources and what better than the city itself for that ? The City of Chicago kindly makes its food inspections data available publicly, and even goes the extra mile by updating it daily. But we also quickly realized that only the word of the city officials is not enough, so we will also take the word of “Chicagoans” into account. The average american citizen talks about everything on social media and food is no exception to that, we will use that to our advantage by leveraging useful information from Yelp a crowd-sourced review forum focused on food establishments. The datasets we relied upon are briefly described here but more thorough information about them can be found in TODO

This dataset mainly consist of facility identification and localization and the inspection characteristics. This information is derived from inspections of restaurants and other food establishments in Chicago from January 1, 2010 to the present. A more detailed description can be found here

Yelp is a business directory service and crowd-sourced review forum, it focuses on publishing crowd-sourced reviews about businesses.
To leverage useful data from the Yelp website, we use a combination of Yelp’s API - Yelp Fusion and web scraping in order to get the reviews of the restaurants in Chicago that have been labeled with “ food poisoning “ during food inspections.

Food inspections

Overview

As we all know, food inspections are the first line of defense between unwary citizens and dirty restaurants. The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) that is responsible for keeping restaurants honest with their food productions. They conduct routine, unannounced food inspections, also called canvass inspections, of over 15,000 retail food establishments to ensure their compliance with the Chicago food code. These inspections are considered as an important proactive measure in preventing foodborne illness outbreaks.

If you are as concerned as us by your food safety, it seems pretty clear that food insepctions’ result is a golden opportunity for the public to learn which restaurants adhere to public health regulations.

How did food inspection evolve from 2010 ? How many inspections are done per year ? What does the inpsector look for ? Is enough being done to keep food safety ? This is the kind of questons that we are looking to answer. The Chcago food inspection dataset statisfies our hunger of response and provides some elements of answer.

First of all, the establishments are classified by risk, from 1 (high risk) to 3 (low risk). Risk 1 establishments propose food with more risky handling practices whereas risk 3 establishments have food with less risk such as packaged or nonperishable food. The risk doesn’t imply a greater probabilty of contamined food but rather that different rules are considered. One of them is that for riskier places the inspections are more frequent.

As a general rule, Risk 1 establishments are inspected at least twice per calendar year; Risk 2 establishments are inspected at least once per calendar year; and Risk 3 establishments are inspected every two years.

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Article critique

We also saw that other sources of media do not shy away from publicly criticizing the city involvment in ensuring sanitary conditions. For example the Chicago Tribune said that :

“The Chicago Department of Public Health requires “high risk” food establishments, such as restaurants, school and hospital kitchens and day care centers to be inspected twice a year. In 2015, fewer than half of them got two inspections, city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson recently reported. Grocery stores are supposed to get an annual inspection, but nearly 1 in 5 were not visited by sanitarians last year. Bars and convenience stores are supposed to be inspected once every two years, but fewer than 1 in 4 got a visit from inspectors in 2014 and 2015.”

Food chains analysis

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Combining Social media and public services to improve prevention of foodborne illnesses in Chicago.

Introduction

Food inspections

Overview

Article critique

Food chains analysis

Social media

Final thoughts